Revision as of 22:39, 21 November 2012

Contents

Background

Smolt is a project for gathering hardware information from users. It consists of a client side package installed on users computers and a server side that the client reports to. For Fedora installs the user is asked at 'firstboot' time if they wish to send their information to the server, if they accept information is sent then, and approximately every month thereafter. This information is stored in a database and scripts are run to generate general statistics over the dataset. In addition a wiki is run on the server side allowing users to provide feedback on specific hardware items.

Rationale

Smolt is largely unmaintained upstream. ( The last upstream commit was more than 10 months ago)

Smolt's reporting scripts do not function under RHEL6.

When smolt's cron job runs to summarize data in the db, the web server becomes unresponsive, leading to daily downtime. Switching db backends might fix this but with no upstream, there's no one to do the work.

As updates to the libraries that smolt is built on occur we've had to work up patches to the code base. This becomes harder as the team's experience adapts to new technologies but smolt's code remains where it was.

The information smolt gathers is somewhat limited.

The data that smolt has does not satisfy the purpose it was originally written for. As adamw put it, as long as it's an opt-in, we can't use the data to generalize about our installed base.

Smolt's design has some limitations that require basic architectural changes to address. The census project aims to create such a rewrite.

admins have to spend time cleaning up the smolt wiki (since, by nature, it allows anonymous edits).

Smolt's wiki means we end up maintaining two mediawiki instances for no real benefit except to keep smolts.org separate from fedoraproject.org